Opinion
Column

EDITORIAL: Council's U-turn a move in the right direction

The returning Canada geese and the first crows - true harbingers of spring (sorry, Mr. Robin) - aren't the only things to come home to roost of late. So did common sense at city council.

An earlier decision to support a fully urban provincial constituency encompassing most of Grande Prairie was reversed in a 7-2 vote Monday, vindication for the original opponents of the idea, Ald. Lorne Radbourne and Ald. Helen Rice, as well as inherently sound judgment.

On the surface, the creation of a riding comprising all of the city except north of 116 Avenue - including Crystal Lake, Crystal Ridge, North Ridge, and Royal Oaks - might have seemed like a good idea.

The Electoral Boundaries Commission floated the new riding, based in part on demands in some quarters that Grande Prairie was big enough and therefore important enough to have its own MLA, without splitting the city in half, as now, and lumping us city folk in with our next-door country cousins.

That's fine as far as it went, but the proposed realignment also created a monstrously gerrymandered riding stretching from Fox Creek north to Valleyview and beyond, and westward across the county and Greenview MD to the B.C. border.

It had to be that way to achieve some degree of population proportion once the bulk of Grande Prairie's residents were tucked inside their own separate electoral bailiwick. Even so, north Grande Prairie had to be included in the new rural riding to accomplish this. Urban riding proponents would have got their wish - except northern city voters would have become, in effect, disenfranchised.

Besides which, if those in favour of a city-only riding at this point in time thought they'd get a cabinet minister out of the realignment, think again. Under the existing two-MLA format, one has always been in cabinet. Right now it's Mel Knight and no, he doesn't live in the city. Neither did Walter Paszkowski. But Gord Graydon did. And the city has had resident MLAs in the past: Wayne Jacques and Elmer Borstad and Winston Backus.

If the city was on its own, surrounded by the sprawling Beaverlodge-Valleyview riding, and given the government emphasis on rural seats vis-a-vis candidate-rich high-profile urban ridings in Edmonton and Calgary, guess which of the two new constituencies up here would be more likely to get a cabinet seat.